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The Invention of the Darling

With no words to speak about our love, we’re each one more alone.

The Joy of Writing and Other Poems

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the page, are letters up to no good.

The Kiss

Below, the kiss silently maneuvers our bodies closer to the rose bed.

The Last Artist in New York

Living as the last artist in Manhattan: it’s the ultimate test of commitment.

The Letters

The letter both pleased and disturbed her. Why did he get in touch?

The Mark on the Wall

How shocking it was to discover these real things were not real.

The Nature of Desire

To fulminate, to go on a tear, because what’s wanted is forbidden.

The Nature of Nostalgia

Our visions of the world fade like the morning star, lost in the light of day.

The New Lustration

A man sits in the Institute of National Memory examining files.

The Night I Watched My Twelve-Year-Old Brother Get Cuffed & Taken from Our Home, Tearing Up, Saying: “I Didn’t Do It!”

Of course he escaped. He would be the one. My legendary brother.

The Only Time We Think of It Is When It’s No Longer There

No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.

The Paperboy

Just before four in the morning, the dog barks, the headlights appear.

The Pink Door

The little door would appear in my mind’s eye, except that now it was ajar.

The Poem Is the Story

Sometimes a story is like a beehive. Sometimes an idea is like a poem.

The Profundities and Other Poems

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

The Rage of the Squat King

What would make a sane person want to watch such blood sport?

The Reader in Quarantine

She could not remember what Past and Present stood for.

The Recording Angel

Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn.

The Saltcutter’s Wife

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

The Second-Worst Rug My Father’s Ever Seen

I hear myself giving advice in my father’s voice: Take the emotion out.

The Session

Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.

The Seventh Seal

Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

The Shortstop

I understood that for us there would be no mourning the shortstop.

The Silence Here Owns Everything

When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.

The Sin of Height

What humanity needed was that gravity-defying miracle, the bird.

The Small Hours

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

The Store in Which I Am Turned to a Widow

Outside of Ikea’s window the nighttime wind tilts like a folk song.

The Story of an Hour

There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.

The Stroke

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

The Stylist

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.